Here's what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.

Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

Three weeks ago, an Obama campaign website, "Keeping GOP Honest," took the extraordinary step of publicly naming and assailing eight private citizens backing Mr. Romney. Titled "Behind the curtain: a brief history of Romney's donors," the post accused them of being "wealthy individuals with less-than-reputable records." Mr. VanderSloot was one of the eight, smeared particularly as being "litigious, combative and a bitter foe of the gay rights movement."

About a week after that post, a man named Michael Wolf contacted the Bonneville County Courthouse in Idaho Falls in search of court records regarding Mr. VanderSloot. Specifically, Mr. Wolf wanted all the documents dealing with Mr. VanderSloot's divorces, as well as a case involving a dispute with a former Melaleuca employee.

Mr. Wolf sent a fax to the clerk's office—which I have obtained—listing four cases he was after. He would later send a second fax, asking for three further court cases dealing with either Melaleuca or Mr. VanderSloot. Mr. Wolf listed only his name and private cellphone number.

Some digging revealed that Mr. Wolf was, until a few months ago, a law clerk on the Democratic side of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. He's found new work. The ID written out at the top of his faxes identified them as coming from "Glenn Simpson." That's the name of a former Wall Street Journal reporter who in 2009 founded a D.C. company that performs private investigative work.

His response? Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that President Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies list,' I knew it was like taping a target on my back." But the more he's thought it through, "the public beatings and false accusations that followed are no deterrent. These tactics will not work in America." He's even "contemplating a second donation."

This is war by other means. Hire PIs to follow Michael Wolf around, investigate his background, his financial affairs, dig through his trash, etc. Fight fire with fire. When the left get aggressive, double down on the right.

This is war by other means. Hire PIs to follow Michael Wolf around, investigate his background, his financial affairs, dig through his trash, etc. Fight fire with fire. When the left get aggressive, double down on the right.

Absolutely right!

These thugs in suits working for Obama have to be fought with the same tough tactics they freely use on Republicans. However, I'm very worried that patrician Mitt Romney won't be up to it. If not, he'll lose - and so will all Americans.

An Obama second term is beyond scary and cannot be allowed to happen. If Romney looks weak against Obama's thuggery, he should be replaced at the August convention. We can't afford another McCain-type campaign where the GOP candidate all but endorses his supposed rival. Not this time.

I don't care about the donation. But coming from the Boy Scouting world, Frank VanderSloot has a reputation for spending a lot of money to protect a pedophile Scoutmaster, Brad Stowell. The paper that broke the story on several protected pedophile Scoutmasters won a Scripps Foundation's 2005 National Journalism Award for the story and changed Idaho law. I believe the stories and remember the uproar at the time. It led to Idaho expanding the statute of limitations for child sexual abuse.

VanderSloot spend a bundle to run full page ads outing the journalist as a homosexual as a 'defense' of Stowell. The reporter Zimmerman, was gay. And Stowell was a pedophile. He was convicted in 1998 after first confessing that he was abusing youth in 1988, yet nothing was done until after the Idaho Falls Post Register's 2005 six-part series on pedophiles in Scouting. And we have pedophiles in Scouting who are protected for years. Just look at the recent Cascade Pacific Council settlement.

23
posted on 05/11/2012 2:09:32 PM PDT
by Scoutmaster
(You knew the job was dangerous when you took it)

The time for civility is long past. The Regime is a band of criminal thugs, and should be treated as such. These thugs will search for diry laundry, and in the absense of such, will munufacture the dirty laundry. We should do the same. This is no longer politics, this is war. Unrestrained open war.

24
posted on 05/11/2012 2:10:42 PM PDT
by Fred Hayek
(The Democratic Party is the operational wing of CPUSA.)

This is Rule 12 of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals" Rule 12 is exactly what they are doing to this man.

Alinsky's Rule 12: Destroy the Individual

RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)

Saul Alinsky was a radical Marxist Communist, although he never officially joined the party.

We need a real third party, and dump the other two, then start over. We are in such deep shit nothing less than a re-set will solve this crisis; in 10 years we will be France or worse, especially if Obama gets a second, third, forth and so on term-—it’s happened before. This country will go down in flames pretty quick if that monster is allowed to put Israel under his bus, and the stupid-ass self-hating American jews will blindly walk off the cliff like they did when they fawned after Hitler in the ‘30s, and will vote their own people’s destruction.

In addition to the new company, SNS Global LLC, the two top journalists will also be affiliated with the International Assessment and Strategy Center, a non-profit foundation focused on security issues. (Former Washington Post investigative reporter Douglas Farah, who’d covered the Columbian drug war and African blood diamonds, is also at the IASC).

Schmidt, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter who only joined the paper last year from the Post, told POLITICO that she and Simpson are “sort of shifting gears.” However, she said, they’ll still be investigating areas they covered while doing traditional journalism—everything from counter-terrorism to international organized crime.

...Mr. VanderSloot acknowledges that "when I first learned that President Obama's campaign had singled me out on his 'enemies list,' I knew it was like taping a target on my back." But the more he's thought it through, "the public beatings and false accusations that followed are no deterrent. These tactics will not work in America." He's even "contemplating a second donation."

Still. If details about Mr. VanderSloot's life become public, and if this hurts his business or those who work for him, Mr. Obama will bear responsibility. This is what happens when the president makes a list.

Very Nixonian. Where's Woodward and Bernstein?

34
posted on 05/11/2012 3:32:01 PM PDT
by Oldeconomybuyer
(The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people's money.)

Actually, Frank VanderSloot has a history of threatening to do that — and as Scoutmaster points out in Post #23, he's sometimes used aggressive tactics in problematic ways.

He's a big opponent of gay marriage (good for him!) and a big supporter of Mitt Romney (not good) who is willing to use his money to out his opponents. I have zero problem with him doing that, but now it's being done back to him by people who, unlike some of his prior opponents, have sufficient money to fight back.

VanderSloot appears to have a long history of pretty aggressive attacks against opponents that I think would raise questions from Freepers who do he same kind of things to liberals that VanderSloot is complaining about being done to him. Here's one article by Salon on him:

There are quite a few other articles as well about VanderSloot which appear to cite facts using publicly available information. I don't think VanderSloot is a naive businessman who made a big donation to conservative causes and then got slammed for doing so.

If the claims in this article are true, he's a wealthy supporter of Mitt Romney who succeeded in business using some pretty aggressive tactics which he then applied to his critics in politics, and is now getting the same kind of scrutiny applied to him by liberals that we as conservatives would give to a wealthy supporter of Barack Obama.

That's America.

For whatever it's worth, while I don't like his support of Mitt Romney one bit, it certainly looks like he's done a lot of good for the opponents of gay marriage. I have no agenda against VanderSloot  I just wish he'd stick to fighting gay marriage and wasn't a Romney supporter.

The truth will come out sooner or later. If all VanderSloot did was make threats against little guys who were mad about his big donations, he's now playing in the big leagues and has found out that both sides fight hard.

Money can buy lots of things, but it can't buy freedom from critics  and shouldn't.

My guess is that when all is said and done, all we'll find here is that VanderSloot is having the same tactics applied to him that he's applied to others, and as a Mormon businessman, I expect that an in-depth evaluation of his personal and professional background won't turn up anything too bad.

Disclaimer:
Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual
posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its
management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the
exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.